A history of the
This is creativity at its purest, in a large industrial plant where art and design have always been cultivated.
This is a business that uses lateral and unconventional thinking.
Bonotto Spa is a fourth-generation textile manufacturer founded by Luigi Bonotto in 1912 in order to produce, at the beginning, straw hats.
Fifty years later, thanks to the intuition of Nicla Donazzan and Luigi Bonotto II, this creative and manufacturing expertise was transformed into a jewel of textile productivity that has grown along with the Italian fashion system.
The company has grown rapidly becoming a complete-cycle vertical industry, with several production sites and employing over two hundred masters of art. Today, led by his sons Lorenzo and Giovanni, who have brought exponential growth to the Company even at international levels, it has become a reference point for the global fashion industry.
The fundamental turning point and key strength of the Bonottos, was, and still is, their vision and their atypical mode of operating within it. Over the years, in fact, the Italian textile industry has faced a dangerous transformation, a sort of production apnea that has viewed gain and mass production as the most important qualities.
Giovanni Bonotto, the creative director of the company, has denounced this devaluation of the product and has become an ambassador for a new way of thinking and producing, which brings him back almost to the origins of the textile production, and which he baptizes in the concept of the “Slow Factory”.
This is a business that uses lateral and unconventional thinking.
Bonotto Spa is a fourth-generation textile manufacturer founded by Luigi Bonotto in 1912 in order to produce, at the beginning, straw hats.
Fifty years later, thanks to the intuition of Nicla Donazzan and Luigi Bonotto II, this creative and manufacturing expertise was transformed into a jewel of textile productivity that has grown along with the Italian fashion system.
The company has grown rapidly becoming a complete-cycle vertical industry, with several production sites and employing over two hundred masters of art. Today, led by his sons Lorenzo and Giovanni, who have brought exponential growth to the Company even at international levels, it has become a reference point for the global fashion industry.
The fundamental turning point and key strength of the Bonottos, was, and still is, their vision and their atypical mode of operating within it. Over the years, in fact, the Italian textile industry has faced a dangerous transformation, a sort of production apnea that has viewed gain and mass production as the most important qualities.
Giovanni Bonotto, the creative director of the company, has denounced this devaluation of the product and has become an ambassador for a new way of thinking and producing, which brings him back almost to the origins of the textile production, and which he baptizes in the concept of the “Slow Factory”.
The Slow Factory
The Slow Factory represents the manifesto against industrial standardisation and mass production at low cost. In Bonotto, all these processes are entrusted to mechanical machines with no automation rather than to electronic machines. Old, discarded, and neglected looms, precisely because they are “slow”. This brings us back, therefore, to the luxury of craftsmanship, to hand-made works and the savoir faire that best expresses the intrinsic Italian heritage of the Veneto countryside, a place dense with creativity and design. The quality of a fabric goes back to being synonymous with the length of time it takes to make it. The factory is no longer a geographical place with pre-fabricated walls but represents a territory with its histories and memories. A modern vision of work and enterprise, combined with old-fashioned technologies and an increasingly innovative creative design. Fabrics, like those of the past, long-lasting, that come from a different and more natural relationship between man and machine. Fabrics that are rich and precious, inside and out. The referral to art is constant and, in Bonotto, so strong that it radically changes the conventional organisational and production process rules. For decades the factory has hosted countless artists who have donated or specially created some of their works. The Fluxus movement, whose greatest collector and patron in Italy is, in fact, Luigi Bonotto II, almost involuntarily imposes on the company a soft operating logic, flexible and fluctuating, which makes work, first a cultural process and then a business. What came about through Fluxus has today been collected and is protected by the Bonotto Foundation, whose headquarters remains firmly located within the large production site in Molvena.
